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30 June 2009

Today Sun released VirtualBox 3.0, a major update introducing Symmetrical Multiprocessing (SMP) in virtual machines as well as much improved 3D support. See the Changes Log... http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

for a complete list of all changes. You can download the binaries here:

23 June 2009

There are some notable updates in SP2, including scalability enhancements for running on systems with up to 24 logical processors which enables support for up to 192 running virtual machines, update for Hyper-V when managed with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and updates for backup/restore of virtual machines with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

15 June 2009

Recently I worked on building VM Appliance and when I was ready to convert my VM to appliance I've figured out that virtual disk is too big. So, I did what I usually do in this situation. And now I'd like to show how you can shrink the virtual disk files of your VMware virtual machines so that if you zip them, they will use much less space. It is then easier to upload and share them with other people.

Yes, I know, many of you now said “Misha is going to talk about Shrink”. You know what, you pretty true, but ...Everybody knows What the "shrink" does. Shrink removes an empty space from .VMDK file.

However, the problem is this: What is empty space?

When Windows deletes a file, it doesn't actually delete the data on the disk, it just deletes the references/pointers in the file allocation table. So when “Shrink” is processing a vmdk and is looking at the raw disk, it's seeing values that aren't empty (non-zero), and exports them as such.

You can easily test this out. Create a new vmdk on a VM. Export the VMDK right after you've created it. The exported files will be very small. Now fill the vmdk up with files and export; it will be very big. Now, delete all the files in the vmdk and export; it'll still be big! If you will try to do a "Shrink", you will see that the vmdk file is still big.

So, before doing a Shrink, I’m always using a really cool command line tool developed by Mark Russinovich, SDelete. Simply, execute SDelete with parameter -c inside running Virtual machine, then shut down the Guest and do a Shrink.

Last note. Just in case you forget how to do a shrink ;). From command line go to C:\Programme\VMware\VMware Server\ and execute the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe as shown in following example:

08 June 2009

Zane Adam, senior director of System Center and Virtualization marketing at Microsoft, shares some exciting news related to Microsoft’s virtualization and System Center offerings and HP’s Insight Control Suite for System Center. With the official release of Insight Control Suite for System Center, HP has taken a significant step in advancing the dynamic datacenter for customers with HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem platforms by enabling HP Insight Control capabilities to be invoked directly from the Microsoft System Center consoles.Continue at Windows Virtualization Team Blog

To enable SSH in vSphere 4i we should do the following steps (similar as esx 3i): 1. First, press Alt + f1 then type “unsupported” and press enter. 2. At the prompt for password, provide the credentials, previously configured, and we will be able to log in to the service console. 3. Do a vi /etc/inetd.conf and look for #ssh. Remove the # and save the file after this. 4. Go to /sbin, and run this command ./services.sh restart

The challenge with Hyper-V is in making your virtual machines highly available. Hyper-V relies on Windows Failover Clustering for its high-availability underpinnings, a technology that can be challenging to set up. Greg will show you the exact steps necessary to ensure your clustering success. You’ll leave with the knowledge you need to get started and you can do all this with completely Free software from StarWind. EVENT DETAILS:Thursday, June 18, 2 PM EDTRegister Today

01 June 2009

Want a quick way to check if your PC can run Windows 7? In general, if your PC can run Windows Vista, it can run Windows 7. But if you're not running Windows Vista, or are just not sure if your system is ready to run Windows 7, download the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta. The Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta is a pre-release version, and is available in U.S. English only.